Her clash with a wolf at Grandma's house starts the yarn spinning in this reinvented fairy tale. It's followed by Rashomon-style flashbacks of a crime probe, with the Three Little Pigs as gluttonous police lackeys.

Someone is stealing recipes in the forest — or something. The plot isn't quite clear, and it doesn't help that director and co-writer Cory Edwards often ignores it in favor of calamitous action.

Those scenes tend to drone even as they rush pell-mell through explosions, chases and other irrelevancies. For a film with bits of adult-level wit, Hoodwinked's cartoonish extremes are maddening.

Its chief fun is its snappy dialogue and fresh characterizations, from Red's girl-power spunk to Grandma's extreme-sports mania to the misunderstood Wolf's work as a journalist.

The characters are colorful — they just lack motivation. And so does the audience. We're not sure why we should care about them other than they seem so sweetly familiar, evoking sugar plums of childhood memories even as they twist them into pretzels.

Some scenes pop out, as when a cursed mountain goat sings everything he says. His banjo-stoked warbles are quite awful, but he's a hoot. A suspicious bunny and an awkward woodsman also spice the mix.

But been there, done that. Echoing such a popular predecessor as Shrek is not a good thing — especially when the echo is so faint.

That's not due solely to the overdone concept, but also to retro animation. The furry critters look good, but the humans have a glassy sheen and brittle hardness, much like work done in the early days of CG or TV's Jimmy Neutron.

If CG animation won't wait for hand-drawn animation, which it's driven almost to oblivion, it also bears the burden of keeping pace with its own state of the art. That art has come too far to embrace a throwback like Hoodwinked as lovably quaint. It's simply dated.